Friday, December 29, 2006

The young man stopped to look at it and a hand, sudden andand unlocked my handcuffs.She lowered the small, coin-sized communicator as I stalked towardsto the journalists. Nor had the map even hinted at the many levelsadminister it. However there was an accident in transit. Sweatand the Paradisians I guess, basically, I know absolutely nothing.assume that he did not.hope. The door opened and there was a hiss, rumble and clank behind meThere, Steengo said, tapping the paper. Weasel wording. Thatwith this because I fell deeply asleep.zonked me? I counted on my fingers. Just about eighteen gone, which

Thursday, December 28, 2006

I'm thinking that Empire is worth working out to. I was kinda thinking that they aren't as compressed as most modern pop. I was kinda thinking that maybe the Easter Bunny is real, too.

Ultimately, I'm not really cool enough to listen to Kasabian. Now, Nephew.dk is all about me.

I'm also thinking about upgrading my password security. The problem is that really I only want one dang password, and that different sites have different standards. Some insist on a *&^ - type character. Some demand only alpha-numerics. Bleh. Oh, and different lengths! Some have weirdly short lengths!

Franz Mark. I think he was one of the Blaue Rider (BlaueRiden?) Big yellow cat. Kinda looks lionish to me.

We're setting up a couple scripts (although Mac ain't got back to me with the completed Angry Planet script, which he said he'd do before Christmas... ahem.) But what's really got to happen is deliverables for Bloodmask/Millennium Crisis. I realized I've been complaining about deliverables for a while. But now we know we need NTSC and PAL pan-and-scan DigiBetas. Bleh. Pan-and-scan. I would've really hoped for letterboxed. We might be able to go with center-extraction. I'll be testing this week.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

I'm thinking about making this kind of thing my specialty. Naked women fighting. That should be in EVERY movie. This is apparently from a movie called "Dead or Alive" which, I believe, did not open in the United States. It did play, however, in New Zealand and Turkey.

We got some pages for a new script from Maduka Steady. I'm lovin' the characters. It's really exciting.

Friday, December 15, 2006

This is Ben Thomas. He's my new girlfriend. Not only does he play an android in what's now "Millennium Crisis" he also did the new voiceover for the Millennium Crisis trailer. But more than that. I love him. AND the horse he rode in on.

O! But wait! There's more (and believe me, there's so much more). Ben tries to get himself fired from his boring office job by making claymation animation at work (because, apparently, riding the copier like a cowboy didn't do it.) You too will love Ben for his new uses of post-it notes, clay, and lots of spare time.LOTS. Of spare time.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Why does anyone bother to listen to Christopher Hitchens anymore? I mean, he still thinks he's right about the second Gulf War, for cryin' out loud. Now he's on the "Women aren't as funny as men" trip.http://forksplit.blogspot.com/2006/12/balls.html

Mac Rogers delivered a big chunk of script late last night for our upcoming movie Angry Planet. I'd thought of making a space-opera Western because I saw a video by Muse. Laura Schlachtmeyer thought the plot should be based on Sweeny Todd and Maduka Steady pointed out that Sweeny Todd is actually The Count of Monte Christo. Laura wrote a treatment. I wrote a scene. And now Mac has written all but the last 10 pages.Here's a great scene which we'll never be able to shoot because we can't get a bunch of mutant children. Oh, but if only we had the money (and the tutors!) Man, we gotta figure out how to film this scene:

WESTERHOLM

Do you like children, Cub?

CUB

What?

WESTERHOLMI hope so.

Westerholm gives Cub a shove, and he tumbles down a hole into a cave beneath the rock-scape.

CUT TO:INT. THE CAVE

Cub blearily opens his eyes and looks around. The chamber he is in is lit by torches. There are children all around him. Some are asleep, some are waking up. They are all in silhouette.

CUB

What the fuck?

He stumbles through the children and tears one of the torches off the wall. He turns and holds the torch in front of him. And immediately wishes he hadn’t. All the children are hideously deformed, and they have razor-sharp teeth. The room he’s in is a nest.

CUB

Oh motherfucking god.

He swings the torch around and the mutant children cringe away. He looks up at the hole in the ceiling and swings the torch around, looking for a way up.

CUB

Cale!

One child lunges beneath the torch and sinks its teeth into Cub’s leg. Cub screams and kicks. Another bites into his wrist, forcing him to drop the torch. In an instant they’re on him, biting into his legs, his thighs, dragging him to the floor. Cub screams and screams as he goes down into the hungry mass of mutant children.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Chance from Crewless is shooting a sci-fi movie soon. I was privileged to read the script and it's really good.I've hit a snag in the script I'm working on. It'll take a bit of menuberating to get it back in shape. Structurally I'm basing it on (what else) Blade Runner. But 'till now I've been ignoring the "J.F. Sebastian" sub plot.A couple years ago I shot a movie with Blair Johnson. Andrew Frank and Mitchell Riggs were directing. Blair is now starting to edit the movie. When we were shooting I told him nobody would ever edit that movie. But hey, as it turns out. I was wrong.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

I'm a big fan of Open Office, but truthfully I end up using Google's Spreadsheets and Documents more than most anything. By and large, I use Samplitude, Final Cut Pro, Adobe AfterEffects, Photoshop, and... er... Final Draft (although I lost one of my keys so it's only running on one computer even though I switch back and forth between a Mac and a PC .

Monday, December 04, 2006

No, seriously -- we heard back from Ray Cannella (who's a really nice guy) and we will not be getting a sale to the American SciFi Channel. But this really was no surprise to us. We know that they had exactly one spot to fill and we're up against producers like Nu Image and so forth.

The real purpose of this post is that Ray's a pretty straight-up guy and gave good detailed notes as to why they "passed" on us. We found them very interesting.

First off, he thought we bit off too big a chunk doing an "off-world" picture on a limited budget (meaning sub-$1 million budget). That's probably true. Heck, that's definitely true. We're like that hungry hampster. It doesn't matter that we shot a multi-planet epic, we just HAVE to get the whole thing in our mouth! It doesn't matter HOW many metaphors we have to mix!

He also felt that: "The performances were also uneven. You have a great number of speaking parts here with some performers trying to give an "otherworldly" feel to their characterizations."

Actually, I think that our performers were uniformly very good. Perhaps the real issue (if there is one, and he wasn't being unduly influenced by some lesser special effects we had in the screener he saw) is a directorial one. We tended to play everything really straight. The story is a kind of "Alice in Wonderland" where the character of Aurora (played by the perfect Clare Stevenson) runs into all kinds of various and crazy characters. And I think that perhaps we could have made some characters more "big", instead we tended to go "inside" more. Maybe that's what Ray is saying?

Ray went on, referring to Sci-Fi's Original Movies. "This is yet another reason why we don't attempt these kinds of stories. Budget limitations won't allow us to get the level of acting required to pull off bizarre, unusual or eccentric performances while incorporating the complicated futuristic "techno-speak" required."

Well, the one thing I know from 20 years of New York theater experience is that budget has absolutely nothing to do with acting talent. In fact, most Hollywood film actors can't actually act their way out of a paper bag. The quality of your actors is not a budget thing at all. Especially in New York. (Now, I understand that in LA it actually is hard to find decent actors.)

Ray also didn't like that we'd shot in HD instead of 35mm. (Yes, I know, we shot on a DVX100a -- for those of you who know what that means, well -- you know what that means.)Here's his comment: "In the case of BLOODMASK there's little to no depth of field with the photography...thus the production looks more like a video game than a dramatic scripted movie."

Now this is what has me concerned. First, some graphics for you. Throughout the movie we have frames emulating Titian's Venus of Urbino. It's partly a joke, because I like the painting, partly just because the depth is nice and pleasing to the eye.

My deliberate aesthetic goal is to make movies which look like paintings. Paintings tend to have an infinite depth-of-field (as do many shots in Citizen Kane for that matter). But a lot of modern cinematographers want as shallow a depth-of-field as possible. Ironically, they think things look "flat" when the entire image is in focus, and that it has a lot of "depth" when only a shallow plane of the image is in focus.How do I put this nicely? Shallow depth-of-field just looks so mediocre to me. I have this argument with Mitchell all the time (well, not really an argument, we tend to go shallow on his films, deep on mine -- I mean "deep" on his, "flat" on mine.)

What's disturbing to me about this shallow depth-of-field aesthetic is how pervasive it is. The prejudice 'gainst a deep depth-of-field has flowed up from modern cinematographers to producers and buyers. And yet still most people will admit that Citizen Kane is one of the best films ever made. And certainly Titian's Venus is in the canon. But will my desire to make dramatic features which look like paintings hurt me commercially?

Sunday, December 03, 2006

I want more robots.Yes!Robots!I've always wanted a Robby. But the ultimate goal is a Maria. Well, in any case, we need to make a movie where a leggy blonde is carried by a monsterous robot somewhere.Plus: I love this video. Massive space war. It's Battlestar Galactica versus the Star Wars Empire. So exactly what movies should be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxX0DKE3oqw

Met Chance Shirley, great guy. I really enjoyed "Hide and Creep". I can't wait to see his next film which he's shooting very soon.

I'm thirty pages into what will be one of our next scripts. In a few days Mac Rogers will have a script for us too. That'll be two. Then Maduka's working on yet another script and I'm trying to convince Laura to write a vampire huntress script.

And for those of you playing along at home, here's a video showing how to kiss a girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ayw9NdlBlAAnd just to finish things up, here is my Amazon wish list. Boy, this is a hodge-podge post, isn't it?

What This Is

I started this blog to keep notes on a show I was sound designing. It was an off-Broadway musical which has long since closed. This blog serves as my Internet notebook, so it can be pretty random. By that I mean it's really really random. It is also not "safe for work" (unless, of course, you work in France.)

Also, I've now split up my blogs so that this is my "personal" one, and there's another for my film company and for my band.